SaaS Start-Up Ideal Customer Profile PowerPoint Template

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a generalized view of a good-fit customer that marketers and sales reps use daily…​

They exist to give team members a simple, easy-to-reference view of what a good and bad customer looks like.​

This is used by high-performing marketers and sales reps to guide their targeting, qualifying, and selling to companies. ​

Your ICP is the guiding principle for finding new customers, upselling existing ones, and showcasing as part of your customer marketing efforts.​

You start with this ICP template!

OK, well, back up - follow this process:

1. Look at customers

Go inside your HubSpot CRM, identifying the deals you won, their MRR, use case and solutions, tenure, growth, and lifetime value of being a customer.​

TIP: Check the data quality here and work with sales reps and customer success to validate the information within the CRM.

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2. With this CRM information, note:​

- Which customers are more likely to convert?​

- Where are your highest retention and renewals?​

- Who is spending the most?​

- Who is growing fast? Who is growing slowly?​

- Which customers make referrals?​

- Which customers have the shortest sales cycles?​

- Who are your most satisfied customers?

3. Look for patterns that can guide your ICP, such as:​

- industry​

- locations​

- company size​

- company life stage​

- contacts involved in buying​

4. Speak to people

Talk to customers, sales reps, customer success, and product teams to validate your patterns. Cross-reference this with the usage of the product and find similar needs and pains between these companies​

5. Spread the ICP

Spread the ICP across leadership and train teams within those functions once an agreement is made. Unifying everyone around these personas focuses every part of the business on making the ideal customer happy—and that means more growth!​

Your ICP enables you to be crystal clear on your market and to tailor all your marketing (and sales) efforts to these people.

But it goes beyond this. You can continue validating your ICP through a market sizing exercise.

Finding your Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is always the first step, but the ideal customer profile takes you into a layer of detail that feeds messaging and buyer personas.

It's a crucial step for SaaS start-ups that is often missed.